"I have been using your site for 10+ years [...] You are extortionists. You are EVIL"
And in those 10 years, how much did you pay for this service?
And in those 10 years, how much did you pay for this service?
People never learn.
it's a big component of goodwill, however.
Backup your Gmail account. Backup your Flickr account. Backup any free service you're using. Otherwise, you have no one to blame but yourself when the rug gets pulled out.
Edit: or start paying for them, as a sibling comment said.
a 1 week notice, with a, say, $40 plan (or even just $40 for the first year with a higher rate later) would probably have had a lot of grumbling, but people who wanted their images back 'on' various sites would be more inclined to pay $40 to make the problem go away. For many folks, $400 is just... beyond their ability to pay immediately.
It's still a super jerk move though. I'd complain too.
I'd also complain if I walked through a really shady part of town with expensive stuff on and got mugged though.
You left your stuff on someone's lawn, they said you could do so for free, and then they started charging for the privledge.
Better put into words by Louis C.K.:
That's very insincere of you at best.
Pathetic!
The fact people are able to put an hour or two of work in to update the listings with the images hosted elsewhere (they have access to the images still, so its not a ransom as some have implied), or choose to pay a pretty low yearly fee to pay for a service they are using to make money on, seems pretty fair to me.
On a separate note, The style of discourse you are using is what is pathetic. Following the trends set by an idiot only makes you look like the idiot you're following.
The service wasn't free, it was paid for by advertisers.
It can be said to be a ransom if your bait and switch makes people desperate to pay you. It will cost people using it to sell a load of money.
They could have grandfathered old time users but they chose not to. So people will have to start digging through and excavating their memories to remember where they put up all bitbucket links.
Finally, I chose not to respond to your last paragraph. See, I'm taking your advice :)
Agreed. I'm not saying they did a good job, and those that use this for images in free forums etc... have a reasonable case to be upset. Those that used the service to make money made a decision to use a free service, and that decision is rarely the correct one when it comes to business. Free services provide tradeoffs that can be changed on short notice without you having any recourse.
>The service wasn't free, it was paid for by advertisers.
The service was free for users, that advertisers paid doesn't change or diminish that in any way. The service was uploading and hosting images, that wasn't paid for, therefore the service was free. Monetizing it with adds doesn't change that.
>They could have grandfathered old time users but they chose not to. So people will have to start digging through and excavating their memories to remember where they put up all bitbucket links.
This is about third party linking, users have full access to their images through photobucket itself. If people remember the various forums and third party sites they posted the images, but not the single centralized photobucket account, then there isn't much you can do to help those people, but the problem does fall on their own actions/decisions.
>Finally, I chose not to respond to your last paragraph. See, I'm taking your advice :)
Admittedly it was a grumpy post. I'm getting tired of that style of discourse. It doesn't add to an argument, it comes across as obstinate and arrogant (then again I manage to do that with full sentences)
Hackernews is free (to an extent as it supplements a business) while Reddit is not free. You just don't pay cash with reddit but you are needed to make mine.
I meant they will not remember where they posted the photo bucket links were posted.
hotlinking wasn't done illegally it was a feature that was encouraged to be used. There are people that are dead now who will have empty spaces for images. I think that is rather unfair.
It would have been different if the business had to close down.
Would they give people a link to where the links were posted? They want people to cough up the money that is why I see it as ransom.
Re: Grumpy post yeah. It happens to the best of us. I was just angry that the op deliberately remove critical information to mislead. Just like news organizations we criticize.
A service delivered for free is a free service. If that is paid for by monetizing ad views/clicks (that can be ignored and/or blocked by the consumer), its still free for the user, therefore its a free service.
The difference between a free service run on donations and a free service run on adds is essentially nothing. Both are monetized free services. At this point we're probably far into opinion territory, so maybe we'll have to agree to disagree here.
>hotlinking wasn't done illegally it was a feature that was encouraged to be used. There are people that are dead now who will have empty spaces for images. I think that is rather unfair.
Unfair? perhaps. Is it fair to a company to provide life long hosting to those people? Do people expect the company will exist forever and be able to infinitely scale? It wasn't done illegally, but neither was the change to disallow hot-linking unless its paid.
>Would they give people a link to where the links were posted? They want people to cough up the money that is why I see it as ransom.
That isn't needed, you just login to your account, download your images (if you need to), and you have them all. If you don't remember where those are posted, then its probably not important enough to you to update, and in many cases old content cannot be updated. At that point, the service going away (photobucket going bankrupt and closing for example) needs to be an expected outcome.